


Brief Candle

by nagi_schwarz



Series: Comment Fic 2017 [51]
Category: Dollhouse
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-05
Updated: 2017-06-05
Packaged: 2018-11-09 09:32:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,813
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11101770
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nagi_schwarz/pseuds/nagi_schwarz
Summary: Written for the fic_promptly prompt: "Dollhouse, author's choice, She always felt there would be a uniform for signing up."Ivy makes a friend on the train to work.





	Brief Candle

Ivy always felt like there should have been a uniform for joining up. A white lab coat didn’t count. She’d worn one all through undergrad and grad school and she’d had to buy the damn thing herself. Topher didn’t even wear one. And it wasn’t like the Dollhouse was going to put the word _Dollhouse_ on any gear it gave its employees. No Dollhouse mugs or t-shirts or keyrings.

Ivy rode the subway to work every day, with her blank employee security badge tucked into her purse and her Gundam Wing lunchbox on her lap and looked like nobody, like she belonged nowhere. Everyone else had an identity, an affiliation. Ivy was - the backup imprint coordinator. Part neuroscientist, part hacker, part writer. She could design a person from the ground up.

But she couldn’t bring herself to talk to an actual person. She was barely able to talk to the actives when they were in the doll state. She never spoke to Dewitt or Mr. Dominic or the other handlers. Topher barely talked to her, too, unless he was demanding juice boxes or bags of chips like an over-intelligent kindergartener.

The actives never talked to her after they’d been imprinted either, rose up from the chair and followed their handlers to the dressing room and make-up rooms, and Ivy was completely invisible. She wasn’t even a person. She was a pair of hands and legs. No one cared what went on in her head unless what she thought or did happened to be an inconvenience. Stop being a person, please. That was what the Dollhouse kept telling her.

She didn’t know what a person was anymore. Was it a body, was it a brain, was it the electrical impulses she programmed into a brain?

One day she couldn’t take it anymore, being invisible, being _alone._

So she took a risk. A huge risk. She talked to someone. Anyone. Promised herself that whoever sat opposite her at the next stop, she’d talk to them, male or female, young or old, black or white or brown or red or yellow -

Or incredibly handsome and broad-shouldered, with a riot of red curls and a bright grin.

He was barely in his seat before Ivy burst out with a slightly strangled, “Hello.”

He raised his eyebrows, pointed to himself, and Ivy nodded desperately.

“Hullo,” he said, and he had an accent. Scottish. Sooo sexy. Ivy had visions of him in a kilt.

Ivy had to stop having visions fast, because he was looking at her like she was slightly crazy and he had to handle her carefully, lest she bite him like a rabid cat.

“I know people aren’t supposed to talk to each other on public transport, but I literally talk to _nobody_ all day, and if I didn’t talk to someone, I’d go crazy.”

The man tilted his head, expression turning sympathetic. “I reckon I’d go mad as well, if I spoke to no one all day. What do you do, for a living?”

No one had ever asked her that before. As soon as she’d gotten a job and started sending money back home, her parents had been satisfied. She thought quickly. “I’m a computer programmer.”

“Aye, I can see how that’d be lonely, just you and a computer. I’m terrible with computers myself.”

“What do _you_ do for a living?” Ivy remembered how to talk to people, the rhythms of conversation, the give and take.

“Out-of-work actor,” he said, “just like everyone else in this town.”

“Well, you’re pretty enough for TV,” Ivy said, and winced when she realized how terrible that sounded.

But he just laughed, loud and free. “Thanks for that boost of confidence. Would that a producer would let me have a chance on screen, aye?”

“Just a chance,” Ivy said, a little breathlessly, because she’d done it, taken a chance.

The man stood up. “This is my stop. Acting classes. Good luck with your computer programming, Miss.”

“Ivy,” she said. “My name is Ivy.”

“Aye, Ivy. My name’s Hamish.” He saluted her with his coffee cup and then shuffled into the crowd at the doors, vanished into the throng.

Ivy craned her neck, tracked his head of red curls before he disappeared into the crowd on the platform.

She felt elated when she finally made it to her stop, sailed off the train and across the platform and out of the station and along the sidewalk to the little side door that looked like an employee door into the high-rise building but was actually the employee door into the Dollhouse below.

On the way home, after a long shift, she kept an eye out for Hamish and his glorious red curls, but he was nowhere to be seen.

Ivy saw him the next morning, though. He looked good, in a t-shirt and jeans worn at the knees, coffee cup balanced on his thigh. She had been careful to pick the same car as yesterday, and she noted which stop he got on.

“Good morning, Hamish.”

“And to you, Miss Ivy. How goes the world of computer programming?”

“Same as yesterday. And the exciting world of acting?”

“Less exciting, more painful. I need to be able to speak with an American accent. British accent - just fine. Hear it all the time. But the American accent is complicated, to say the least.” Hamish cleared his throat and proceeded to carefully pronounce, “Hi, my name’s Jamie, and I like surfing.”

Ivy blinked. He’d mangled his vowels and his _r_ pretty badly. “Um, well - it’s not bad, for a start.”

“I’ve been learning for three months,” Hamish said with a sigh.

Ivy knew how to fix that, where in the brain language and accents came from, could flip a switch for him -

She derailed that train of thought in an instant. “The thing about accent is less to do with the sound and more to do with the shapes you make with your mouth. Like - when you said _surfing_ , where was your tongue when you pronounced the _i?_ In American, it’s up at the roof of our mouth, right behind our front teeth. But for you, it’s a bit further back from the teeth, isn’t it? And not as high.”

Hamish blinked at her, and she saw him murmuring soundlessly to himself, shaping his pretty mouth around silent words. Then he cleared his throat and tried again.

“There, wasn’t that better?”

Hamish nodded. “Aye, yes it was. Thank you! My dialect coach has never mentioned that before.”

“It was something I learned, when I learned another language,” Ivy said. “You may never quite make it like a native speaker, but you can get close enough to fool a native speaker.”

Hamish saluted her with his cup of coffee. “Thanks, Ivy. I really appreciate it. I’d better go - my stop.” He started toward the doors, then paused. “Will I be seeing you tomorrow?”

Ivy nodded. “Yeah. And tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow.” She had one day off a week, but it rotated every week, and half the time she got called in anyway.

Hamish grinned at her, cleared his throat, and recited,

“Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,  
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,  
To the last syllable of recorded time;  
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools  
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!”

Ivy laughed, and Hamish winked at her before he vanished into the crowd.

That day, not even Topher’s constant whining for snacks could get her down.

The next day, Hamish sat beside her, and she carefully walked him through some more of his lines in an American accent. He taught her some choice phrases in Scottish the day after that. The day after that, Ivy brought him a coffee, and he brought her a little bag of rice crackers. Every morning, Ivy looked forward to seeing Hamish and his smile, hearing his voice, and so she was sad when she woke and realized it was her day off.

And then she checked her phone and there were a dozen frantic and increasingly loud and angry messages from Topher, so she scrambled out of bed and into her clothes and she remembered her keys and her passcard but not her lunchbox or anything else, and she got onto the wrong car at the train station, so she had to fight her way through the morning work crowds to get to the right place.

But the train got to Hamish’s stop, and he wasn’t there.

Ivy sat in her usual spot and stared despondently at the snoring old Russian woman in Hamish’s usual spot, and she quietly, softly hated her life.

When the train got to her stop, she trudged off the car and across the platform and into the Dollhouse, and she set her keys on her desk and followed the sound of Topher’s voice to where he was kneeling beside the imprint chair, its guts strewn about him. He was wielding a screwdriver in one hand and a soldering iron in the other and cursing because the thing wasn’t working and Ivy sighed, went to fetch the soldering wire.

She knelt beside him and fed the wire into the iron, and Topher started to relax, and his ranting started to make sense, something about Echo being remotely wiped and a bug being planted in the chair and something about Alpha.

There were no actives with the designation Alpha, not anymore. Something from before Ivy’s time that no one really talked about.

She just worked and wondered what Hamish was doing and if he was all right, and she fetched snacks for Topher, and finally he declared the chair repaired.

“All right, let’s give this a test run.” He reached out, tapped the intercom into the handlers’ break room. “Hey, get me an active, any active, so I can make sure this works.”

“Roger that, Topher. Bravo’s nearby. We’ll bring him right up.”

Ivy had helped herself to one of Topher’s juice boxes, and she stood beside him, waiting for the active to arrive.

“C’mon in, Bravo.” The Handler, a slender, dark-haired woman named Aisha, held the door open wide.

And there was Hamish. Only he was wearing the soft t-shirt and yoga pants of an active in the doll state, and his expression was perfectly blank as he drifted over to the chair.

Ivy dropped her juicebox. Dark purple grape juice exploded everywhere, and Topher swore, and Aisha cried out, swiped a hand over her pristine white blouse and shouted at Ivy.

Bravo lifted a hand to his face, wiped away the droplets of grape juice that looked like so much blood, and said, “Is everything all right? I try to be my best.” He had a flawless American accent.

Ivy reached out, smoothed a hand over his hair, and said, “I know. I know.”

 


End file.
